Table Of ContentThe
Hidden Origins
of
ISLAM
The
Hidden Origins
of
ISLAM
NEW RESEARCH INTO ITS EARLY HISTORY
EDITED BY KARL-HEINZ OHLIG AND GERD-R.P UIN
I Prometheus Books
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228-2119
Published 2010 by Prometheus Books
The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History. Copyright © 2010 by
Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R. Puin. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or
a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Inquiries should be addressed to
Prometheus Books
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228-2119
VOICE: 716-691-0133
FAX; 716-691-0137
WWW.PROMETHEUSBOOKS.COM
14 13 12 II 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hidden origins of Islam : new research into its early history / edited by Karl-Heinz
Ohlig and Gerd-R. Puin.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59102-634-1 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
1. Islam—History. I. Ohlig, Karl-Heinz, 1938- II. Puin, Gerd-R.
BP55.H53 2008
297.09'021—dc22 2008049316
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Foreword 1
Islam’s “Hidden” Origins
Karl-Heinz Ohlig
PART I. THE EARLY HISTORY OE ISLAM
1. The Early History of Islam, Following Inscriptional 17
and Numismatic Testimony
Volker Popp
2. A New Interpretation of the Arabic Inscription in 125
Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock
Christoph Luxenberg
3. On the Origin of the Informants of the Prophet 153
Claude Gilliot
4. ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan and the 189
Process of the Qur’an’s Composition
Alfred-Louis de Premare
5
6 Contents
PART II. NEW ASPECTS FOR THE EMERGENCE
AND CHARACTERISTIC OF ISLAM
5. A Personal Look at Some Aspects of the History of 225
Koranic Criticism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Ibn Warraq
6. Pre-Islamic Arabic—Koranic Arabic—
Classical Arabic: A Continuum? 263
Pierre Lurcher
7. From Syriac to Pahlavi: The Contribution of the Sassanian Iraq 283
to the Beginning of the Arabic Writing
Sergio Noja Noseda
8. Early Evidences of Variant Readings in Quranic Manuscripts 311
Alba Fedeli
9. Leuke Kome = Laykah, the Arsians = ’Ashab ’al-Rass, and Other 335
Pre-Islamic Names in the Qur an: A Way Out of the “Tanglewood”?
Gerd-R. Puin
10. Syrian and Arabian Christianity and the Qur’an 361
Karl-Heinz Ohlig
Contributors 403
FOREWORD
ISLAM’S ‘TODDEN” ORIGINS
Karl-Heinz Ohlig
r
r
his volume of collected essays seeks to bring a bit of light into the
hidden beginnings of a major world religion, namely, Islam.
This intention, as well as my calling Islam’s beginnings “hidden,” may
well astound many, for the beginnings and later development of only a few
religions seem to be as clearly known as those of Islam.
In the early sixth century, the prophet Muhammad (570-632) arose; he
proclaimed the revelations of Allah in Mecca and Medina and eventually
united all the tribes of the Arabian peninsula into one umma under his reli
gious and political leadership. The life of the prophet, his upbringing and
marriages, his work, the Hijra from Mecca to Medina in 622, and his battles
are narrated in detail in Muslim publications as well as those concerning the
academic discipline of Islamic studies.
After his death, the story continued with successes in war and in religion.
This early period gave birth to large Islamic empires, beginning with the four
“rightly guided” caliphs (632-661), continuing under the Umayyad caliphs,
with their capital in Damascus (661-750), and culminating under the
Abbasids (beginning in 749), who had their political seat in Baghdad begin
ning in 762. Why, then, “hidden” origins?
It is well known that there are only a few bits of information to be found
7
8 Foreword
in the Qur’an that offer biographical material about the Meccan prophet;
however, the consequences of this fact are drawn out by only a few scholars
of Islam. All the biographical “information” we have can be found in two
types of sources. The first consists of the biographical works of the early
ninth and tenth centuries. These include: 1) the “Sira” of Ibn Hisham (d.
834), which claims to be related to a non-extant text of Ibn Is-haq (d. 768);
2) a history of military campaigns by al-Waqidi (d. 822); 3) a book called
“Classes” or “Generations” by Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845); and 4) a book called
“Annals” by al-Tabari (d. 922). The second type of source consists of the six
canonical collections of hadith, which date from the late ninth century; these
are ascribed to the following redactors: 1) al-Bukhari (d. 870); 2) Muslim (d.
875); 3) Abu Dawud (d. 888); 4) al-Tirmidhi (d. 892); 5) al-Nasa’i (d. 915);
and 6)I bn Maja (d. 886).
Following the canons of historical-critical research, these reports,
written approximately two hundred years after the fact, should be taken into
consideration only with great reservations.^ They were collected at a time
when Muhammad was the paradigm of identification for a large and pow
erful empire; consequently, the reports about him were appropriately styl
ized. Their legendary character forces itself on the reader who comes to the
text uncritically; certain questions are asked in ways that become thematic,
despite the fact that some of the questions could not have played a role
during the suggested lifetime of the prophet; and so on.2
Nonetheless, these sources are the first to depict the life of Muhammad
and trace the Qur’an back to his proclamations in Mecca and Medina, so that
the shape of the Arabian prophet and his life remains historically in shadow.
To put the issue more sharply, the problem of the sources casts doubt on the
entire question of Muhammad’s historicity: “Muhammad is not a historical
figure, and his official biography is a product of the age in which it was
written.”^ In the same vein, only in the ninth century was it first claimed that
the proclamations of Muhammad were brought together into the current,
complete text of the Qur’an by a commision of three Meccans under the lead
ership of Zayd ibn Thabit from Medina. This editorial work is thought to have
occurred in the caliphate of‘Uthman (644-656), specifically between 650 and
656—that is, eighteen to twenty-four years after the death of Muhammad.
Rudi Paret writes the following in the introduction to his translation of
the Qur’an, and in doing so he gives expression to a consensus practically
unanimous among scholars of Islam: “We have no reason to accept the idea
OKlig: Islam's "Hidden" Origins 9
that even one single verse in the whole Koran does not stem from
Muhammad.”"^ But why? How does he know this to be true? On what
sources does he build his argument? Such a claim highlights many issues,
including: the many tensions within the Qur’an; the placement alongside one
another of vai'ying, sometimes even contradictory, traditions; its apparent
redactional editorial work; the late date of its emergence as the Qur’an we
know (as the earliest manuscript fragments indicate); and the much later date
of the ascription of the text to the Arabian prophet.^ The way that Paret and
others simply pass over all these literary-critical problems is, quite frankly,
shocking.
The Islamic literature of the ninth century also contributes to current
narratives of the later history of the spread of Islam, although only a few
“witnesses” from the first two Muslim centuries are extant. Usually, the diffi
culties these sources create are not mentioned. Josef van Ess is a notable
exception. He admits that there are only a few early witnesses and, for the first
century after the Hijra, only a few inscriptions, such as those on the Dome of
the Rock in Jerusalem, on the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, and in numis
matic legends. Further, he admits that all (later) Islamic texts stand “under
suspicion of projection.”6 Consequently, he refuses to present the first century
at all; rather, he begins with the second, although he also states that the same
problems exist for this century, in that there are hardly any “original texts” to
be found."^ In other words, the first two “Islamic” centuries lie in the shadows
of history, and it remains inexplicable how the development of a large Islamic
empire could have left behind no witnesses whatsoever, even among groups
from whom we might expect such traces, such as the enemies of the Arabs,
the many Byzantines known for their literary skills and output, and the Jews
and Christians living under the alleged Islamic authority.
With help from the few datable and localizable extant witnesses, namely,
coins and inscriptions, the contributors to this volume undertake the task of
explicating the contours of this development in the first two centuries. It will
be proven that the numismatic discoveries from this period, as well as the
inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, actually concern Christian texts and
symbols, which document Syrian-Arabian theological ideas: that God is one
and single, and that the one he has sent (Jesus) is to be praised {muhammad).
Such statements were aimed at demarcating the texts’ communities from
Byzantine conceptions of the Trinity and of Christology. They document the
proud attempt of an Arabian Christianity and the empires shaped by it to create
10 Foreword.
and defend their own identity. In addition, it will become clear that, long
before the appearance of the idea of a Hijra, there was an Arabian-Christian
reckoning of time, which began with the year 622 and was only later “con
verted” to a Muslim meaning. Until approximately the end of the eighth cen
tury, so it seems, Arabian-Christian tribal leaders governed the regions of the
Near East and of North Africa—indeed, the Umayyad leaders and even the
early Abbasids were Christians.
It was not until the second century after the Hijra that the idea of
Muhammad seems to have been loosened from its original connection
(namely, to Jesus) and then isolated as a conception unto itself. Further, this
process of detachment seems to have experienced both an expansion of the
idea, to include a Christian apostle-prophet named Muhammad, and an inter
mediate stage that served as a conceptual bridge, namely, the worship of a cer
tain ‘Ali (“exalted”), who took over normative functions in a more concrete
way and in the place of the distant and transcendent Muhammad (Jesus). In the
eighth century, and more fully in the ninth, the developing independence of the
Muhammad idea made it possible to bind it with (or to establish it as the foun
dation for) the idea of an Arab prophet of this same name, an idea that had
already been transmitted through history to some degree, and through this
process gained its own independent shape. This also bound the Muhammad
idea to the Arabian holy places of Mecca and Medina. All of this seems to have
served the interest of the creation of an Arabian identity for the Abbasid
Empire. At this time, then, the biographical works and the collections of
Hadith about the Sunna appeared. All of the available traditions concerning
earlier Arabian ralers and controversies were then woven into a continuing his
tory of the Islamic religion and the development of its empire. The older ven
eration of' Ali was repressed and survives only among the Shiite traditions.
From the perspective of the history of religions, one recognizes here a
fascinating process in the emergence of a new religion. The individuals in
question, just like the redactors of the Pentateuch, infused their religion into
a “canonical” time of beginnings, in which they then grounded and legiti
mated it.
This interpretation, argued among these contributions most strongly by
Volker Popp, and deepened by Christoph Luxenberg (although already sug
gested by Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren), is not simply a subjective
opinion; rather, it is supported here by the only sources able to express them
selves in terms of history.
